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Background to International Counterfeiting It has been estimated that counterfeiting, the unauthorized imitation of goods or services with intent to deceive (6), was responsible for approximately $60 billion in lost sales of consumer and industrial products in the United States in 1985. In comparison, $3 billion in sales were lost in United States market in 1978 due to piracy of reputable merchandise. Currently, counterfeiting has been estimated as increasing at an incredible rate of thirty percent a year. One of the fastest growing product counterfeit segments is in industrial products. Close to five percent of the total world trade consumer industrial products is accounted for by the importation of fraudulent goods and services. The counterfeit market in the United States exists and continues to thrive due to the immense demand for copies of well‐known, reputable brands, but at a fraction of the cost of the real item. By forging goods, counterfeiters reduce their costs by denying the royalties that rightfully belong to the originator of the forged item. In another aspect, if existing technology is copied from another firm, the counterfeiting organization has virtually no research and development costs while the firm that produced the technology costs are significantly higher than those of the counterfeiter.

The book consists of a collection of works on utilising the automatic identification technology provided by Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) to address the problems of global counterfeiting of goods. The book presents current research, directed to securing supply chains against the efforts of counterfeit operators, carried out at the Auto-ID Labs around the globe. The collection of works and the organisation of the book assume very little knowledge on the part of the reader on Networked RFID systems as the material provided in the introduction familiarises the reader with concepts, underlying principles and vulnerabilities of modern RFID systems. The collection of works presented on highlighting the counterfeiting problem and problems with existing low cost RFID technology is an important guide to practitioners, professionals and graduates in the area of RFID systems application, implementation and integration.

Product counterfeiting crimes have detrimental effects on consumers, brand owners, public health, the economy, and even national security. Over time, as product counterfeiting crimes and the response to them have evolved, U.S. federal legislation has developed and state legislation has followed suit, but with considerable variation across the states. The purpose of this article is to place product counterfeiting in the context of intellectual property rights, provide a historical review of relevant federal legislation, and systematically examine the extent to which state laws differ in terms of characteristics, remedies, and penalties. Additionally, we calculate indices of civil and criminal protections that illustrate the overall strength of each state's legislative framework. Collectively, this assessment provides a solid foundation for understanding the development of product counterfeiting legislation and serves as a basis for advancing research, policy, and practice.

Counterfeit products, particularly pharmaceuticals, electronic devices, and apparels, are widespread. They threaten consumer safety and cause huge economic losses to licit supply chain partners and governments. Although a number of traditional anti-counterfeiting technologies, such as holograms and chemical tags, are available to combat counterfeiting, they are vulnerable to imitation or being reused. Besides, these technologies are intended to protect individual items, rather than to safeguard an entire supply chain. As such, fake products may likely be injected into the supply chain to hurt end-consumers. Track-and-trace technology based on Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) has recently emerged as a promising tool to combat counterfeiting, because of its automatic and non-line-of-sight capability to identify massive product items. By maintaining an electronic pedigree (e-pedigree) that records the transaction information of product items along the supply chain, this approach stands out for protecting the supply chain against infiltration, eliminating theft and fraud, facilitating recall of defective products, and supporting remote authentication. However, a number of technical and critical issues have yet to be solved for practical implementation of RFID-based track-and-trace anti-counterfeiting. These include generation of accurate initial product e-pedigree in fast moving manufacturing lines, precise e-pedigree updating in batch product distributing and receiving, and fast e- pedigree queries for remote and real-time product authentication from end-customers. Without fully addressing these issues, the accumulated product e-pedigree data would be untrustworthy, rendering any subsequent operations of track-and-trace and product authentication unreliable. This thesis investigates the crucial implementation issues in RFID-based track-and-trace anti-counterfeiting. It firstly presents an innovative track-and-trace anti-counterfeiting system, based on which a TDPS algorithm is proposed for generation of initial product e-pedigree in fast moving production lines. The TDPS overcomes many practical issues, such as tag writing error and tag locking failure, and helps identify the bottleneck of initial product e-pedigree generation. To tackle the bottleneck, the TDPS is further optimized by incorporating a block writing method to enhance the tag EPC writing efficiency and an integration method to balance the overhead of RFID equipment. In product distributing and receiving, a mechanized 3D scanning method is proposed to improve bulk item identification rate and enhance the accuracy and completeness of product e-pedigree. Indeed, RFID-based track-and-trace anti-counterfeiting mandates a relatively high bulk item identification rate for product authentication and e-pedigree updating. Experimental results demonstrate that the mechanized 3D scanning can achieve a bulk item reading rate of up to 98.9%, which largely outperforms the widely documented bulk reading rate (70%) in real applications. In retailing level, the efficiency of e-pedigree queries would hugely impact on customer shopping experience and the effectiveness of track-and-trace anti-counterfeiting. A partition-based method is therefore developed to cluster product e-pedigree data to improve the speed of e-pedigree queries. This approach partitions the accumulated e-pedigree data into fixed and dynamic groups, such that queries are conducted mainly on active data, rather than on the whole historical data sets. By addressing the above key issues, this thesis contributes to making implementation of RFID-based track-and-trace anti-counterfeiting practically viable and reliable. ; published_or_final_version ; Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering ; Master ; Master of Philosophy

The manufacture and sale of counterfeit products is a widespread problem that affects a wide range of industries - from the pharmaceutical industry, electronics, and electrical equipment industry, clothing, footwear, to food, cosmetics, and luxury products industries. Counterfeiting and Fraud in Supply Chains explains the reasons behind the popularity of counterfeiting and fraud among both consumers and companies, a systematic and holistic overview and critical examination of the situations that have caused an increasing trend of those criminal activities. For all businesses, counterfeiting causes serious economic and social impact and can even be dangerous, posing health, privacy, and safety risks ranging from mild to life-threatening. Covering topics from the harmful effects of counterfeiting related to the environment, trade, foreign investment, employment, innovation, and criminality, Counterfeiting and Fraud in Supply Chains documents the unregulated production and the use of dangerous machinery and materials to attain a high profit margin. Counterfeiting and Fraud in Supply Chains boosts the existing knowledge about the profoundly multi-faceted dimension of the counterfeiting market, comprising the work of a team of theorists and practitioners who characterize a multidisciplinary approach to counterfeiting and fraud.

- Preface - Foreword - Executive summary - Quantifying the UK impacts of the global trade incounterfeit products: methodological background - The effects of trade in fake goods on the UKeconomy - Improving the evidence base on counterfeiting and piracy - Conclusions and next steps - Methodological appendix - Tables.

This unique Handbook provides multiple perspectives on the growth of illicit trade, primarily exploring counterfeits and internet piracy. It includes expert opinion on a wide range of topics including the evaluation of key global enforcement issues, government and private-sector agency initiatives to stifle illicit trade, and the evolution of piracy on the internet. The authors also assess the efficacy of anti-counterfeiting strategies such as targeted consumer campaigns, working with intermediaries in the supply chain, authentication technology, and online brand protection

This article focuses on wine counterfeiting and the policing of fake wines in mainland China. Relying on rich data drawn from published materials and open sources, it discusses three important themes in relation to product counterfeiting: the definitional issue; the scope, scale and organisation of the counterfeiting business; and law enforcement against product piracy. The aim is to broaden our knowledge about the counterfeiting trade, to develop a clear understanding of the illegitimate market, and to help to renew countermeasures that not only enable the exercising of tighter control over the counterfeiting industry but also disrupt the illegal behaviours of counterfeiters. Rather than place emphasis on the protection of intellectual property rights, this article stresses public health concerns with regard to dangerous counterfeit goods such as fake wines. Examining wine counterfeiting within the existing analytical framework of organised crime research, this article contributes to analysis of the nature of product counterfeiting and the issue of policing counterfeit goods.

Abstract
Counterfeit products and the brand pirates who make, distribute, and sell them continue to be a challenge for many marketers around the globe. Estimates of global sales for bogus products are in the hundreds of billions of dollars and recent evidence suggests that fakes are prevalent in both developed and developing countries. We investigate brand/product counterfeiting from a consumer search perspective. As the quality of counterfeits improves, it is becoming more difficult for the consumer to identify them. Interviews with 102 international informants yield a picture of the cues consumers use to detect counterfeits and the roles of face and taste in decisions to purchase or not to purchase fake goods. We conclude with a discussion of some managerial implications.

Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

- Preface and Foreword - Acronyms and abbreviations - Executive summary - The study scope, definitions and rationale - The importance of the ICT sector and threats posed by counterfeiting - Mapping global patterns in counterfeit ICT goods - Assessing the trade in counterfeit ICT products - Charting the trade routes of fake ICT goods - Trade in counterfeit ICT goods: Conclusion - Annexes.